Deal with the low-hanging fruit first

18 April 2016

My Inbox Zero policy has taken a beating in 2016. I blame my puppy, Bix, for allowing me to get behind on it. (I blame Bix for a lot of things…it’s very handy.) But whatever the reason, I’ve had a really challenging time keeping my inbox in check this year.

I really love the habit of emptying my inbox daily. It has so many benefits. But it is one of those habits that’s a little harder to reinstitute after a backlog develops. I have no interesting in declaring email bankruptcy. i just want to get it down to zero and get back to a daily habit of keeping it down every day, if not to zero then to no more than ten.

I was working on it this morning. When I sat down at my computer I had something like 70 messages in my inbox. I set a goal of getting it down to 20. I surpassed that goal—I’m at 6 right now. I would really like to get it down to zero by the time I go to bed tonight.

So how did I go from 70 to 6 in the course of an hour or so this morning? I started with the low-hanging fruit. This is the order in which I took things:

I deleted junk emails that came in overnight. (I get an astounding number of Italian-language spams. Talk about low-hanging fruit.)
I moved emails that required no action but that I wanted to archive.
I skimmed a few newsletters that I had let languish in my inbox—that took almost no time and revealed a few nuggets I was glad to know about. Then I deleted the newsletters.
I forwarded to Evernote emails that I wanted easy access to or reminders about.
I took action on a few emails, like deciding to register for a conference and then actually registering and making a hotel reservation.

That left me with six emails, all of which require some sort of consideration and reply. I am confident that given less than half an hour of focused time, I can take action and archive them before I go to bed tonight (and, of course, deal with everything else that comes in in the interim).

With email, as with clutter or so many other things, dealing with the easy items first can have a large impact. And once you’ve distilled the backlog, it becomes much easier to focus on the important items and take action.

I’m traveling now, but I have high hopes that I’ll get to zero in my inbox today and maintain it until I get home. (I am fortunate in that my schedule allows me some focused times in the morning on this trip.)

Taking just a few minutes a day to take care of the emails I consider the low-hanging fruit (or better yet, delete them the moment I see them), will help make this process easier.

ETA: It’s 10:30 p.m. on April 18 and I was able to get my inbox down to zero. It feels so good!!

Photo by Ian Carroll via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License

Tagged with: email, inbox zero